Ver Tanzt? by Black Ox Orkestar

Evenly split between instrumentals and vocal tunes, this debut album is a compelling blend of originals and new arrangements for pieces pulled from various Eastern European songbooks. The band aimed to expand the definition of Jewish diasporic music, by learning and reinterpreting songs and rhythms from all over Slavic and Balkan Europe. Lyrics are in Yiddish and speak forcefully to the bloody history and intractable contradictions of Jewish diaspora and ‘return’. With backgrounds in punk-rock, free-jazz, and other liberation musics, the all-acoustic playing on this record benefits from a genuinely spirited delivery and intensely original approaches to arrangements that never feel forced. This is modern folk music from Eastern European sources played strong, unburdened by antiseptic production and/or cheap sentimentality.

Songs range from the propulsive to the sublimely restrained. “Fishelakh in Vaser” explodes with a pumping free-music rhythm section, “Cretan Song” is a staccato Balkan dance, and “Ver Tantz?” is an angry, politically-charged klezmer-punk original. Instrumentals “Shvartze Flamen…” and “Nign”, along with the brilliant original “Toyte Goyes” (lyrics taken from a poem by Yiddish writer Itzik Fefer) are meditative and heartrending. Jessica Moss (violin, bass clarinet), Thierry Amar (contrebasse) and Scott Levine Gilmore (vocals, mandolin, cymbalom, drums) all play or played in Silver Mt. Zion, and Gabe Levine (clarinet, guitar) was chief songwriter in Sackville.

Black Ox Orkestar plays modern Jewish diasporic music that draws from Klezmer, Romani, Arabic, Balkan and other Eastern European folkways, through the lens of indie rock, experimental folk and avant-jazz sensibilities. The band combines interpretations of instrumental traditionals with original compositions sung primarily in Yiddish. Formed in 2000 in Montréal, disbanded in 2006, reunited in 2021.